If I Can Make It There
by nimmieamee
Summary: Minific in anticipation of Fantastic Beasts. What brings Newt to New York?


"My DEAREST Newt,

In response to your query. The city is two things: on the surface, concrete and steel and glass and money. And below that: sewage and rattling trains and soft flesh and murder. And it has always had two levels (and within those levels, eleven thousand more), and it will never have less, and as the great mundane dream of New York grows, in banks and struggles to pay the rent, and new ice cream parlors on the ground floors of department stores; so too will grow the magical and sordid nightmare of it, the townhouses where mistresses poison the men who will not marry them, the tunnels beneath Chinatown that house the Tongs, and the back rooms where bankers plot to steal money that does not exist yet.

I tell you this so that you know that to attempt to separate magical and Muggle New York is useless. There is no Diagon Alley, cordoned off and separate. There is no Leaky Cauldron to serve as a crossroads. Every alley and every bar is a crossroads; for there, it would not violate the Statute to shout that you can do magic to a crowd of amused children in the park, to advertise that you sell elixirs and potions, to declare yourself a wizard on the IRT subway. The City might not even take notice, and if it did, you would simply be another dark part of it — you would simply be the mad underground.

It is the ideal place to begin your journey, my dear Newt. You can ask after the mutated beasts in Brooklyn's canal in perfect safety — someone will believe you. You can see the zoo in the Bronx, with its hidden Hippogriff cages. You can examine the wild snakes and crocodiles of the American South, domesticated to serve as children's pets in the magical parlors of Harlem; and though you will meet as many musicians as magicians there, as many poets as prophets, you with your oddities, with the bits of yourself that do not fit in, with your terrific fascination for reptile and were-rabbit… You will attract no special notice. The many levels of New York proliferate, and where yesterday a researcher who would pry open the mouth of an invisible alligator was odd, today it is simply another sight, another addition — something to ignore as the belles of Lenox Avenue hurry along their way.

But!

But. There are those who live on the surface and in the underground at the same time. Men like you, who came from a divided world, where they might have faced Dark Lords or mad purebloods or else pogroms. Men in Muggle suits, a gleam in their eye, who can make numbers and money vanish, and false opportunities appear. On parchment, these men seem to have no means: they are simple businessmen, they are cogs in the city. They are magical Muggles, or perhaps very mundane wizards. They perform great bits of charmwork such as vanishing the evidence, disposing of the witnesses. They have mastered every level; they own Aurors and Muggle policemen alike; and they take all kinds, magical and mundane, as long as one is not fastidious, not afraid of a little soft flesh or murder.

And their names are not old pureblood names, like the ones that hold sway for you, Newt. They are funny names, the names of very young men. They might make a stupid person think of house elves: Lansky. Bugsy. Lucky.

Are they wizards? Who knows? In this city, it does not matter. It does not matter if you are a witty Harlem half-blood, a dark-eyed witch aiding the Tongs, a werewolf selling Cuban coffee, a goblin from the hinterlands of Queens, or else jolly and fair and vampiric and descended from Dutch traders. We cannot determine who is worthy of magic and who is not, who is a Gryffindor to be cheered or a Slytherin to be feared. There are no signposts. No well-established names — save that joke, the elusive invisible Knickerbocker clan of New York legend — no defenders of the old magic, no worry over whether one has magic at all. No Notts or Malfoys, no persons who own great vaults and house elves.

Here the viperous, the threatening — they do not need names or property or magic. They do not need to own house elves. Magical and Muggle alike jump to do their bidding. They own people.

The old world has such rigid lines, and seeks to preserve them. Here it is different. There is fluidity, and the wise seek to preserve that. But it is not perfect, my dear Newt. There is danger here, too."

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originally posted on my tumblr, livesandliesofwizards.


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